The War on Michael Steele

“This was a war of Obama’s choosing. This is not something the United States has actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.”

Strictly speaking, Republican Party Chair Michael Steele was way off base when he made this remark at a closed-door meeting of party contributors in Connecticut.

For the war began in 2001 under George W. Bush and was backed by almost all Americans, who collectively cheered the downfall of the Taliban and the rout of al-Qaeda from its sanctuary in Afghanistan.

Yet Steele was not entirely wrong.

Today, a majority of Americans do not believe the nine-year war in Afghanistan is any longer worth the rising cost in blood and money. And by declaring it a “war of necessity” and tripling U.S. forces there, this president has made it “Obama’s war” every bit as much as LBJ in 1964 and 1965 made Vietnam “Johnson’s War.”

While Steele has spent every waking hour since his words hit the airwaves explaining, and declaring his commitment to victory, of far more interest is the alacrity with which neoconservatives piled on the chairman, demanding his resignation, while senators castigated him for remarks unacceptable for a Republican Party leader.

William Kristol’s demand for Steele’s resignation was echoed by Charles Krauthammer and Liz Cheney, daughter of the vice president. From Afghanistan, Steele was attacked by Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain, who suggested he think again about his capacity to lead the Republican National Committee.

Behind the swiftness and severity of the attacks on one of their own by Republican pundits and politicians are motives more serious and sinister than exasperation at another gaffe by Michael Steele.

The War Party is conducting this pre-emptive strike on Steele to send a message to dissenters. In Krauthammer’s phrase, it is now a “capital offense” for a Republican leader not to support the Obama troop surge and the Obama-Petraeus policy.

Yet a majority of Americans oppose the Afghan war. And the point made by Steele about the futility of fighting in Afghanistan has been made by columnists George Will and Tony Blankley, ex-Rep. Joe Scarborough, Ron Paul, and antiwar conservatives and moderates.

When exactly did supporting Obama’s war policy become a litmus test for loyal Republicans?

What the War Party is up to here is a naked attempt to impose its orthodoxy, about the threat of “Islamofascism” and the Long War, on the entire GOP, 28 months before a presidential election.

Republicans of all persuasions should recoil at such arrogance.

For whence does it come, if not the same hawks and neocons who beat the drums for a unnecessary war on Iraq that cost 4,000 U.S. dead, 35,000 wounded and $700 billion, while making widows and orphans of half a million Iraqis?

And what was that all about? Invading and occupying a country that never attacked us — to strip it of weapons it did not have.

Certainly, as the last nominee of the Republican Party, McCain can claim to be titular leader, as could George W. Bush, or Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell or John Boehner.

But, if memory serves, the Bush-McCain party was repudiated in landslides in 2006 and 2008, giving Democrats the presidency, the House and a veto-proof Senate. And high among the reasons the country turned on the GOP is that, like Harry Truman and LBJ, the Bush-McCain GOP marched us into wars they could not win and could not end.

This campaign to censure and remove Steele is designed to censor debate and stifle dissent on Obama’s war policy, as long as Obama’s war policy closely tracks the agenda of the War Party.

Should Obama declare that he intends to stand by his deadline and begin pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by July 2011, those Republicans today accusing Steele of not supporting the troops and undercutting the president in wartime would themselves begin undercutting the president.

In November, the Republican Party will make gains. But the party will be deluding itself if it assumes this means America wants a return to the interventionist policies that brought us the Iraq and Afghan wars. The country will simply be saying: We reject Obama’s liberalism as emphatically as we rejected Bush neoconservatism.

Most Americans today approve of the agreed-upon end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq by August and removal of all U.S. troops by the end of 2011, just as they support an American withdrawal from Afghanistan, starting a year from now.

But to contend that those who want the withdrawals to begin sooner, or those who want them to begin later, are unpatriotic and do not support the troops is itself unpatriotic.

The time for Republicans to decide on what the foreign policy of the party and a new administration should be is in the primaries of 2012. Until then, let every voice be heard, including that of Michael Steele.

Buchanan: “William Kristol’s demand for Steele’s resignation was echoed by Charles Krauthammer…In Krauthammer’s phrase, it is now a “capital offense” for a Republican leader not to support the Obama troop surge and the Obama-Petraeus policy.”

So the neocons are now reverting to authoritarian, Bolshevik type and issuing their version of Order 227:

“On July 28, 1942, in a desperate attempt to stop the collapse, Stalin issued “order 227″ that “every granule of Soviet soil must be stubbornly defended to the last drop of blood.”, and secret police units were placed behind the Russian front units to kill anyone who deserts or retreats.”http://www.2worldwar2.com/stalingrad.htm

But the patriotic, anti-War Party, anti-Empire, pro-Constitution, rebelling American people are not the equivalent of the invading German Army (except in the minds of deranged neocons), and we don’t yet live in a Soviet State (although they’re certainly trying to drag us there fast).

Wouldn’t these guys be a better fit issuing orders to the IDF in Israel?

Let’s hope that the neocon/Likud axis doesn’t use its stockpile of undeclared WMDs for a preemptive strike against the real enemy: the American people. One must also hope that the US Air Force has up-to-date targetting maps and contingency plans for taking out Israel’s nuclear weapons, which under the current fanatic regime are a growing danger to its neighbors in the region, including our NATO ally Turkey.

Obama is the President and has greatly enlarged the scale of the Afghan War. He didn’t start it but campaigned on it’s enlargement and continuance. Naturally we’d have done the same in this continually blindly looking to save face kind of way we have with foreign entanglements we blunder into with no thought on how to get out. ( Vietnam, Iraq anyone?) It’s time for our leaders to actually lead and if Michael Steele would lead us out of Afghanistan then all power to him. If Obama is too afraid of public opinion to take a brave decision to leave then he should resign.

Are we not allowed the famous free speech and much talked about but little tested freedom in opinions on Afghanistan. Lets have an open debate. the war in or out? What does winning mean? How do we know when we’ve won? Are we really safer ? What threat does Afghanistan pose if we left that couldn’t be handled ala Joe Bidens stand off and thump from afar aproach? I honestly feel there is a substantial part of their populace that doesn’t accept us and won’t accept us in 10 years 20 years time. So bully for you Michael Steele I had thought you were an idiot but there is a strong element of fact to your opinion on Afghanistan.

Maybe Rove/Cheney and co are somehow right but unless we have an open debate the whole premise of the war is untested. I like your columns more as you get older Pat especially as they give some variance to the constraining violence oriented policy of the Palin / De Mint crowd.

For people forever talking authoritively about faith they seem awfully fond of killing and injuring without any differentiation between civilians and armed enemies. War is dirty and destructive theres no escaping it. Maybe it’s time for us to take a new turn in our attitude about ourselves and people different to ourselves.

Pat, you are no less than 100% correct about this. This IS the divide between left and right. These are the choices we are given (don’t give me any crap about a free country and you can vote for your leaders– no, we vote for who our leaders choose for us).

Again, our choices are, war or socialism. That is what this country has come to. The majority of Americans want neither, but we are being forced into one or the other whether we like it or not.

This country and its leaders have come to a pathetic place in history and I can only resign myself that I am not represented at all. It’s my tax money, but I have no say in this Free Country.

The fascism that needs to be eradicated, lives and thrives right here in the western world.

“Obama is the President and has greatly enlarged the scale of the Afghan War. He didn’t start it but campaigned on it’s enlargement and continuance.”

During the 2008 campaign, Obama was calling for an additional 10,000 troops in Afghanistan: “While Obama called for sending two more brigades to Afghanistan, McCain called for sending three.” http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2008/07/obama_afghanist.html Within the first month and a half of his presidency, he had nearly doubled that figure, exceeding even the figure McCain had used. Of course, later that fall, Obama, in his wisdom, decided to send another 30,000, so that he has sent roughly five times the number he was telling the American public during his campaign just a year earlier.

Good point tbraton on the gearing up of the Afghan War since obamas inception.

We are so in love with all this invasion killing etc. I can’t see how it is conservative or even traditionally Republican. War is destabilising Americas internal politics and I can’t help wondering if this war is now a political sideshow to show whos the toughest for American elections and has sweet fa to do with Afghanistan itself. Must watch 1984 again.

Every American dead in every American “war” since mine (Korea – 2 tours within 2 years – Stalin had to be shown we would fight) has been a wasted one. And to continue any war when you know you can’t win is committing negligent homicide of those who will die, on all sides, for the sake of your hubris, your face-saving.

I am wondering if the notation about awaiting my “moderation” is really the censoring it seems to be. Let’s see, what wasn’t a waste of all the lives lost for the sake of hubris, of empire? Vietnam, Lebanon, the glorious arrest of Noriega, other Carribean adventures, Iraq and the untold suffering and death we have unleashed there compared to the order maintained by a brutal dictator of their own, the quagmire of an Afghanistan with many advocating more war with Iran. Perhaps Desert Storm was justified, and certainly conducted with distinct purpose and limit, IF one concedes that the stirring of the mid-East political pot from within would have been all bad. A Saadam-controlled mid-East crude supply would still have sold us our needs and maybe even hastened our own oil independence.

Michael Steele is a “company man,” and by the looks of his back pedaling he continues to be a company man who will probably never break free of the company due to his love of the salary and prestige the company provides him with. However, I am pleasantly surprised by his off-the-record comments. Maybe others will be encouraged to be as frank and not back-pedal.

Krauthhammer, ever the Insider, is beginning to look more and more like “Doctor No.” Certainly his Council on Foreign Relations credentials qualify him for that title.

As a patriotic lefty, I also agree. What I find interesting here is that the Bush-43 presidency has left fissures in the GOP. Pres. Reagan must be admired for his effectiveness in turning the GOP into an effective ideological movement: this movement also has able to reach out to “the center” (people unable to form a clear worldview. The prescription drug benefit, the neocon philosophy, the uniquely off-putting nature of the Bush-43 administration: the GOP has been decimated. Short of another unifying force – like Pres. Reagan – the GOP will continue to spin out of control. While a liberal, I view this with dismay: the future of the 2-party system is in doubt. So I mixed metaphors, shoot me.